


said the sinner to the saint

by radialarch



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:44:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2654177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky tries to be good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	said the sinner to the saint

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Sara, for everything, but especially for agreeing with me that this fandom needs way more religion fic.

_"You must not touch icons; else the gold leaf clings to your hands."_

 

It takes the soldier some time to get to Steve.

At the Smithsonian, there is an exhibit with his face on it. He looks at it for a long time, at the face of _James Buchanan Barnes_.

He’d had sisters, and a best friend. He’d been good with a rifle and popular with the ladies. He’d had—

He’d had a _past_.

He does not remember very much from before. The press of a thumb into a shoulder, the swish of a flowered dress around bare ankles. These things float hazily in his head, attached to nothing, meaningless.

What he does remember:

> a rabbity-looking man with a satisfied smile;
> 
> the scrape of straps tight across his body;
> 
> blood; blood; blood;
> 
> the chair.

They had made him forget the chair. Every time, he took the bite block and fell against the seat and let them wipe him into nothing.

There is a child staring at him. He looks back and she makes a muffled noise. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is round, open.

She is afraid of him.

The thought is not pleasant. He tries to smile and manages an approximation of one of Barnes’s more pleasant expressions. Her alarm subsides; she smiles shyly at him.

He turns away slowly and walks out of the exhibit. There is a metallic taste in his mouth and he wants the solid weight of a gun in his hand.

He remembers a man who laughed as he pushed the soldier into the chair. He would not mind, he thinks with sudden clarity, if _he_ were afraid of him.

 

* * *

 

“Stand down, soldier,” the man says, nearly hysterical. The soldier puts a neat bullethole in the center of his forehead.

 

* * *

 

He lets his body take him from base to base. Some of the agents try to speak to him. Others just run.

Some of them pray.

He kills them all the same way: kneeling on the ground, the gun pressed to their heads. He pulls the trigger and feels cold satisfaction curl in his stomach.

 

* * *

 

Steve finds the soldier coming out of a bunker, both hand equally steady.

The soldier remembers the feeling of Steve underneath him, bleeding out. He remembers the way his bones gave way under his fists. He remembers the way it’d felt, aiming his pistol at Steve and seeing his limbs jerk in response.

He remembers all of this, and watches Steve approach: with his hands up and his vitals unguarded.

“Hello, Buck,” Steve says.

He’s _smiling_.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the soldier says, measuredly. “You—”

Steve’s hands are white, clean. The soldier knows instinctively that he does not belong.

“Yes, _thank you_ ,” says the Falcon, gesturing widely. “Please, let’s all get out of here instead of standing around like a murder party.”

“I’m not going without you,” Steve says, looking directly at the soldier.

The soldier looks away. “I can’t,” he says. “There are. Others.”

“Then I’ll come with you.”

Steve steps forward, slow enough that the soldier does not register it as a threat. He brings his hands up to clasp the soldier’s hands in his. The action streaks Steve’s hands with blood, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Steve, with his smile and his shield and bright-eyed pleading, is all wrong for this. But Steve’s thumb is rubbing soft circles against the soldier’s wrist, and he says, against all reason, “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

They rent a car. The Falcon — Sam — drives.

“No offense,” he says, “but you two learned to drive in a war zone.”

The soldier climbs into the back seat out of habit. Steve hesitates for a fraction of a second and then slides in next to him.

“I’m just going to,” he nods, “sit here, if that’s okay?”

He sounds — hopeful. The soldier says, “Sure,” before he can think about it.

The drive is long. Sam occasionally hums along to music from the radio. Steve looks mostly at the soldier with an encouraging smile.

The soldier thinks he should be saying something, but he does not know what would be acceptable.

He looks out the window and pretends he doesn’t see Steve’s face fall.

 

* * *

 

Zola had once called him a work of art. "The soldier is proof," he’d said, a proprietary hand on the soldier's shoulder, “that we have transcended humanity.”

He got it wrong, the soldier thinks. They’d never transcended anything; they’d only succeeded in making him utterly, brutally human.

It’s a human urge that rises in his throat when he sights an agent through a window, and when he squeezes the trigger. It’s cold and dirty, and they never could wipe that out of him, no matter how hard they tried.

If they wanted art, they should have taken Steve.

Steve in motion is breathtaking. The soldier watches through the scope as Steve slams the edge of his shield into an agent’s neck and sweeps another off his feet. The sun is high and it lights up Steve’s hair, turning it finely gold.

When it’s over, Steve turns towards the soldier. There’s red on his hands when he grins and throws the soldier a salute.

He could go, under those hands. It wouldn’t be so bad.

 

* * *

 

It’s the last Hydra base the soldier knows of. The soldier drops the final agent with a shot through his chest, and it’s like something in his own chest snaps — he has nothing more to do, nothing left for him.

Steve says, “Come home with me.”

The soldier is breathing hard. There is a dead body at his feet and the blood is still wet on his gloves.

Steve says, “Please, Buck.” His hand comes up, reaches towards the soldier, and then falls back down.

The soldier’s hands smell of gunpowder and metal. He is a weapon and the last of his handlers lies on the ground.

He says, “Yes.”

 

* * *

 

Steve’s apartment is not large. The sightlines are clear, the furniture placed around paths of motion.

It looks like a good place to live.

“You can take my bed,” Steve says as the soldier is peering into the single bedroom. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I don’t need a bed,” the soldier says, and watches Steve’s face shutter.

Oh, he thinks. That was the wrong thing to say.

"Take the bed anyway," Steve says, falsely bright. “It’s a good one.”

It’s easy to know what to say, this time. “All right,” the soldier says, and grins back at Steve.

 

* * *

 

The bed is too soft. The soldier feels like he's sinking, like he's being swallowed whole. He shifts and turns for a long time and eventually gives up trying to sleep.

The pillow smells of Steve. He’d noted it earlier and dismissed it as obvious, irrelevant. But the thought comes back to him now, magnified and insistent: the pillow smells of Steve.

The soldier thinks about Steve’s head on the pillow every night, Steve’s body fitting into the dip in the mattress. Steve may be sleeping on the sofa tonight but he’s left something here, an echo of himself, and the soldier is nearly drowning in it.

The soldier is, also, half-hard against his thigh.

He flushes in the darkness, thinking of Steve, gold and beautiful. His hand is splayed on his thigh and he could, he _could_ —

He curls his fingers closed.

Maybe Bucky Barnes, brave and kind and good, could have deserved Steve. But the soldier’s done too much for too long; he has no right to want Steve like this.

He slides out of bed and lowers himself to the floor. Lies down with his head on his arms. Tries not to think about his cock, hot and aching.

 

* * *

 

In the morning the soldier listens Steve waking up. Steve doesn’t do anything loudly, but there’s deliberation in the sounds he makes; the soldier can trace his steps from the living room to the kitchen, hear the hiss of the coffee machine and the clink of a mug.

Steve comes to knock on the door. “Bucky?” he says, very quietly. But the soldier doesn’t respond, and eventually he retreats.

The front door opens, and then closes. A hush falls over the apartment, the kind that signals an impersonal emptiness.

The soldier emerges from the bedroom to find that Steve’s left a note.

 _Went for a run_ , it says. _Help yourself to anything you’d like._

He doesn’t know if there’s anything he’d like. He circles the kitchen twice, looking at the mug left in the sink. Then he shakes his head and makes his way to the bathroom.

He remembers seeing flashes of himself in frosted over glass; but it’s different looking at a mirror, his surprised eyes staring back at him. He runs his hand over the rough stubble of his jaw and feels a flash of distaste.

A shave, then.

Steve has safety razors stocked in the cabinet. He fills the sink with warm water, soaps up his razor and lifts it to the patch of skin beneath his left ear.

The blade makes a shushing noise against his skin as it moves. He lets the sound lull him half to sleep, falling into the rhythmic motions.

The water trickles down his jaw.

The water trickles down his jaw, down the line of his throat —

— he sees red, red, red and his hands tremble; his hands that are wet, dripping, and he drops the razor and thrusts his hands into the basin, but the water’s turned to blood and he scrubs and scrubs but the red won’t wash from his hands —

— he’s on the floor and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he bites his tongue and strangled noises are coming from his throat —

 _His hands won’t stop shaking_.

 

* * *

 

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Oh, god, Buck,” and there’s a hand in his hair, a hand on his shoulder and the soldier looks up into Steve’s eyes, very blue.

“Sorry,” he says thickly.

Steve is kneeling on the floor with him, touching him. He picks up the razor from the floor and touches the side of the soldier’s face. “Can I?” he says softly.

“Okay,” the soldier says. He feels drained, empty.

Steve sets one hand on the soldier’s jaw and lifts the other up. The razor rasps its way through the stubble, stroke by stroke, and the soldier’s eyes slide closed slowly.

By the time Steve puts a finger to the point of his jaw and tips his head up, his hands have stopped trembling. The razor moves over the underside of his jaw, over the tender skin of his throat, and his pulse beats steadily under Steve’s careful hands.

“Okay,” Steve says at last, and drops his hands. “Okay, Buck.”

The soldier opens his eyes. Steve has his sleeves rolled up. His forearms are flecked with bits of white; his hands are wet.

 _God_ , the soldier thinks, helplessly. _What I do to you_.

 

* * *

 

The soldier sleeps through that night, but badly, and wakes up as the sun comes up. He watches shadows move across the wall before restlessness takes hold of him.

He paces the room briefly and then wanders out. He’s careful not to make any noise.

Steve is still sleeping, laid across the sofa with his spine straight, his hands folded over his stomach. The soldier settles on the floor and watches Steve: the straight slope of his nose, the curve of his mouth. He looks carved out of marble, too true to be real.

The soldier looks at his hands and remembers how those hands had felt on him: precise and delicate, like Steve might break him. Like Steve could ever hurt him.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. He watches the rise and fall of Steve’s chest, slows his own breathing to match. He looks at Steve’s hands and does not think about his own.

Steve comes awake in degrees, faint awareness tugging at the corners of his mouth. When he spots the soldier, he says “Bucky?” in a sleep-scratchy voice, a smile breaking over his face.

It’s too much. The sunlight is filtering through the curtains like they’re stained glass and Steve is looking at him like he’s a miracle instead of something broken.

 _Don’t_ , he wants to say. He opens his mouth but his throat is tight and it won’t let out a sound. He reaches for Steve instead, fumbles him to an upright position and cradles his hips in his hands.

Steve doesn’t say a word when the soldier takes his cock into his mouth, just lets out a soft exhale.

Steve is hot and heavy on his tongue. He licks at him slowly, carefully, takes him into his mouth inch by inch. He breathes through his nose and presses his forehead to the soft skin of Steve’s stomach, because he can’t bear to look at Steve’s face, can’t know what he must be thinking at this moment —

Steve’s hands brush against his face, very light. They cradle his head, gentle, and one of Steve’s thumbs is rubbing over the soldier’s cheekbone.

When Steve comes he makes a soft noise, then he’s hauling the soldier up. He searches for his mouth and kisses him, kisses him, and Steve is murmuring “Bucky,” over and over, a breathless litany.

They kiss until the soldier’s gone boneless in Steve’s arms, and then Steve reaches for him and pulls back with a sudden, sharp breath.

The soldier isn’t hard.

“Bucky,” Steve says very slowly. “Did you want — do you want —”

The soldier lets himself slide down to the floor. His hands are on Steve’s knees; he withdraws them.

“You wanted it,” he says, a little desperate. This wasn’t about him; it was never about him.

He wants Steve to _understand_. There’s a light about him that’s pure and clean, and the soldier would give him anything, do anything for him.

Instead Steve’s face falls. The soldier watches the line of Steve’s throat as he swallows.

The soldier pulls back on his heels. “Sorry,” he offers, the only thing he has.

Steve makes a choked little noise and gets to his feet. “I just,” he rasps, “I need—”

Steve walks into the bathroom. The soldier hears the lock click.

There are soft, stifled hiccups coming through the door. The soldier sits with a hand pressed flat to the wood and says, “Sorry,” again.

 

* * *

 

It takes a long time for Steve to come back out; when he does, his face is pale and determined. “Bucky,” he says, dropping down next to the soldier.

The soldier waits.

Steve rubs his face with one hand. “I’m not your handler, Buck,” he says.

“No,” the soldier says, appalled. Steve is not — Steve is — “You’re _better_ ,” he says, trying to explain. He thinks, hazily, of high arched ceilings, of sitting in silence with his head bowed.

“No, I’m not,” Steve says, shaking his head. “Bucky.”

Steve catches hold of the soldier’s hands. The soldier looks down, at where Steve’s hands are tangled with his own: one metal, one flesh.

“I’m human, same as you,” Steve says. “We’ve always been — we’re _friends_ , Buck, you don’t have to—” Steve makes a frustrated noise and raises their hands up. “These hands,” he says. “They’ve killed, they’ve been bloody. They’re the same, don’t you see?”

Steve uncurls the fingers of the metal hand, one by one. Then he lowers his head to press his lips to the inside of the wrist — to the center of the palm. A tremor runs down the soldier’s spine.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Steve says, a little wetly. “Not unless you want to.”

“Okay,” the soldier says, very quiet. “Okay, Steve.”

 

* * *

 

The soldier takes to going outside in the afternoons. He takes the fire escape and mostly sticks to the roofs — people don’t bother looking up.

Brooklyn has changed: buildings knocked down and replaced whole, people grown and gone. There are only fragments left to jog his memory: _yes, I was here. Yes, I was real._

It’s not much of a homecoming. But, then again, it’s a wonder he has a home to come to at all.

 

* * *

 

The days go by quiet. The soldier learns (relearns) what Steve looks like when he’s tired, the way his mouth goes thin and his shoulders draw up.

The soldier thinks he understands. He’s tired, too.

 

* * *

 

It’s evening, and Steve is curled up on the sofa reading. “Got a lot to catch up on,” he’d said. “Have to start sometimes.”

The soldier is on the other side of the sofa. He’s let sleep come near; his eyes are half-lidded and his limbs are heavy, relaxed. He’s warm and content — almost happy.

He tracks Steve’s movements as he bends his head and winces; as he brings up one of his hands to rub at the back of his neck.

“You should take the bed,” the soldier says, stirring up. “Sofa’s too small for you.”

“I’m fine,” Steve says immediately. “And you need it more.”

“I don’t,” the soldier says. “It’s yours, you should take it.”

“Bucky,” Steve says tiredly. “You don’t have to do things just because you think you should.”

“I don’t — I don’t,” the soldier says, and as he says it he realizes that it’s true. “I want to, Steve. I do.”

Steve looks at him for a moment. “Okay,” he says with a faint smile. “Maybe we can share.”

 

* * *

 

The soldier wakes up slowly; there’s a warmth all along his right side and he smiles, a little, when he turns his head and sees that Steve’s already awake.

“Hi,” Steve says. His hair is sticking up slightly and his mouth is softer than usual, his smile lopsided.

“Steve,” he says, and brings up a hand to touch to corner of Steve’s mouth.

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says. He holds himself very still.

“Steve,” he says, and the words come out hoarse, “I want—”

And Steve says, achingly slow, “Okay.”

He strips unceremoniously, and then straddles Steve before Steve can get up. “Let me,” he says, and peels Steve’s t-shirt up. Steve’s skin is smooth, unmarred, and he _wants_ , wants to touch every inch of it.

He runs his hands across Steve’s stomach, and then drifts lower to slide his boxers down his hips. Steve makes a muffled noise; his hips jerk up.

“Bucky,” Steve says and rolls them both over, laying him gently down on the bed. “God, I—”

And it should be wrong, it should be sacrilege, the way Steve is looking at him — but it doesn’t feel like that: not when Steve presses his mouth to his throat, when he runs his careful fingers down his scarred left side, when he wraps his hand around their cocks and starts to move.

“Bucky,” Steve mumbles into his shoulder afterwards, sprawled bonelessly on top of him. It sounds half a prayer and half benediction.

“Yeah, Steve,” Bucky says. The sun’s come up and the room is lit up, very bright. “Yeah, it’s me.”


End file.
